Elsa of Arendelle
by ColdandWinterAir
Summary: It was just so hard not to feel sometimes.


Every day her sister's footsteps skipped carelessly to the door, and every day she pounded her regular five knocks into it. Every day she would laugh and press her mouth to the keyhole and ask, ask the inevitable question:

_"Do you want to_ build_ a snowman?"_

But there was always the inevitable answer.

_"Go away, Anna."_

And every day, she did.

And on the other side of the door, the fresh wood still wet with paint was completely coated in a blanket of glittering frost, accompanied by silver icy tentacles slithering on the floor and icicles hanging off the ceiling. Every day, Elsa curled her hands into fists as if to contain the storm inside and tried to draw the curse back inside her, but it never worked. Nothing did. And in the earlier years, she used to sit on the ledge by her window overlooking all the gleaming lights of Arendelle and remember the days when she used to let the magic go, when she could bend it to her will and shape it however she wanted to. When she could shape entire playrooms out of ice, and when she could summon winter wonderlands perfect for two sisters to play and delight in. But, when she dared to slip the gloves off with pale, trembling fingers and summon a snowball to her hand (an action which had once been as simple as breathing) what happened instead was that ice, rushing uncontrollably from her fingers, smashed into the wall opposite her so that she started and fell off the ledge and scrambled to put the glove back on again.

In the end, she became used to her father coming in, poised as always and as regal as the king should look, and looking at the icy walls and sighing resignedly.

He would close the door and take her hand in his, holding it no matter how hard she tried to slip her cursed hand away, and he would always say the same words.

_"Conceal it, don't feel it, Elsa. Remember?"_

Many times the answer _"It's just so hard not to feel sometimes, Papa_," jumped to her lips, but she bit her tongue and swallowed it, because sometimes it was best to say nothing at all.

* * *

The years slipped by like melting snow and suddenly Anna was no longer the five-year-old who loved her sister's magic and ate too much chocolate and begged Papa for horse-riding lessons. One day Elsa looked up from her dinner on one of the special occasions when she _did _come down for dinner and Anna had gotten taller, her hair longer, and somehow even more reckless. Elsa would lie in her bed and sometimes hear the musical _crash, crash, crash_ of Anna riding their bike into the suits of armor lined up at the bottom of the spiraling stairwell. (And she would wish that she could be on that bike too, wish that she could be building snowmen with her sister outside on the palace grounds and sneaking into the kitchens to steal chocolate, but then her father would slip into her wintery bedroom and sigh and reality would come crashing around her ears.)

And as the years passed, Elsa's ventures outside of her room became rarer and rarer until she only came down on her and Anna's birthday. She would watch Anna eagerly rip the colorful shreds of paper off her gifts and pretend that ice wasn't crusting at the bottom of her goblet and that she couldn't feel the storm swirling inside. And when her birthday came around, she would grip her icy goblet all the harder and fight the instinct to flinch away when Anna flounced into the dining hall, carrying her gift-wrapped present, and slid it across the table toward her elder sister.

"Happy birthday," she usually said, a hopeful smile tinging the corners of her lips as she craned her neck to watch Elsa's face, eager to see her reaction when she saw the present.

Elsa reached out with trembling fingers to touch her present and pretended that she could not feel frost crystallizing underneath her gloved fingers.

She strained a polite, meaningless smile at Anna.

"Thank you," she would say, slipping the gift into her lap. She often felt other answers burning her lips, like _Of course I want to build a snowman_ or even something crazy like _I miss you_, but sometimes it was best to say nothing at all.

Elsa hoped that Anna would give up on her attempts to get her out of her room and play and build snowmen, but she never did. She hoped that Anna would just give up in order to spare her own feelings so that Elsa wouldn't have to keep hurting them over and over again, but one thing hadn't changed in the past five years, and that was that Anna was as stubborn as ever.

* * *

A couple days after Elsa's eighteenth birthday, her parents received a message embossed with the golden sun of Corona inviting them to the crown princess's wedding, and the morning after it was decided—they would leave for Corona next week. This inspired mixed emotions among the palace's residents. While the servants immediately hastened to make preparations for the king and queen's voyage and Anna was immediately excited at the mention of weddings (even though she couldn't go), Elsa watched her mother and father pack with icy dread pooling in the pit of her stomach.

Since she had shut the door to her new room, not a day had gone by where her parents weren't constantly _there _to help her. And now they were going to be in Corona for _two full weeks_. It was almost too much for Elsa to think about.

And so on the day when they left (on the day when Anna, racing to her parents' bedroom, hesitated ever so slightly by her door before sighing and rushing off and for some strange reason, leaving her sister with a hollow, empty feeling inside her) Elsa left her room temporarily to wait at the bottom of the stairs as her parents made their last-minute preparations. When they turned to her to share goodbyes she slipped on her royal mask and curtsied, just like she knew she should.

But she couldn't help but look up and ask with pleading blue eyes: "….Do you have to go?"

Her parents smiled fondly at her, and her father's light green eyes kindled with warmth as he said, "You'll be fine, Elsa."

* * *

And Elsa waited for them to come back, counted down the days until their return, when they would come up to her room and tell her that they were back and regale her with stories of the wedding. But the only one who came to her room when the two weeks were up was Kai, who told her through the keyhole that he was terribly sorry, but there was a storm at sea and the ship was not built to withstand storms like that and—

* * *

Gerda asked her, later, if she'd like to come to the funeral with her and Kai and Anna, but by then flaky crystals of ice were already splashed all over the painted-blue walls of her room and she looked at the painting of her father holding the scepter and orb and staring nervously at her from across the room and knew that he would want her to conceal, as always.

So the answer was a reluctant no, and she watched the proceedings from her large, iced-over window, watched the two tall, solemn gravestones be erected and flank the small, black-clothed figure in the middle. She touched her cold fingers to the glass as if trying to reach out to Anna, but frost tumbled over the surface as soon as she did so and she jerked her hand away, just like she was eight years old again.

When the funeral was over, Anna made her slow, hunched way back to the palace and through the gates and up the stairs, the floorboards softly sighing underneath her feet as she made her way to the chilly white door—

"Elsa?"

The cold began to dangerously prickle her fingers and Elsa immediately pulled on her gloves to make sure that they were there and safely encasing her fingers, as she always did when Anna was too close to the cold.

"Please, I know you're in there….people are asking where you've been."

The snow falling in rings about her began to intensify. _Don't feel. Conceal it, Elsa. Don't feel it_.

"They say 'have courage' and I'm trying to…"

Spears of frost began to shoot out from her body, creeping along the walls, coating the door, and increasing her mixed feelings of guilt and despair and _fear _as she desperately tried to keep the storm inside.

"I'm right out here for you…just let me in."

_Conceal, don't feel_.

"We only have each other—it's just you and me."

_It's just so hard not to feel sometimes, Papa._

"What are we gonna _do_?" Her last word was twisted by a sob as Anna leaned against the door and sank to a sitting position, and Elsa could feel Anna's own cold seeping through the door.

"_Do you want to build a snowman_?"

And as her sister let out another small sob, Elsa considered it. She considered parting her lips ever so slightly and saying that one, simple, small word:

"_Yes."_

But as she opened her eyes and mouth and was forced to drink in the room, the room that had suddenly been encased in a second, wintery skin, and Papa's stern light green gaze from his portrait above her desk, she curled her hands into fists (once more, keeping the blizzard contained and away from Anna) and closed her mouth.

Sometimes it was better to say nothing at all.

* * *

**I apologize for my lousy writing:)**

**Thanks for reading!**


End file.
